United Food and Commercial Workers

The United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) is a labor union representing 1,300,000 workers in the United States and Canada in the agriculture, healthcare, meatpacking, poultry and food processing, manufacturing, textile, chemical trades, and retail food industries. The union was founded in June 1979 as a merger of two smaller unions, and it merged with many other unions from 1980 to 1998. The union was affiliated with the AFL-CIO until 2005, and it reaffiliated with the union in 2013. From the 1990s to 2008, the UFCW waged war on Smithfield Foods, which had resisted the unionization of its Bladen County, North Carolina meatpacking plant workers; in 2008, the majority of the workers voted to join the union after the UFCW ended its boycott and the company halted its RICO lawsuit against UFCW, ending the conflict. The UFCW also fought against Walmart, which treated its workers poorly and drove down employment standards. After 2007, the UFCW attacked the British company Tesco for refusing to negotiate with the union, as none of its workers were union members. In 2014, the UFCW PAC donated 99% of its fundraising money to Democratic Party candidates and 1% to Republican Party candidates, and the union was mostly affiliated with the Democrats, with UFCW Local 1262 endorsing Phil Murphy for New Jersey governor in 2017.